A Presidential biography, a look at the toll of Syria’s civil war, and a spiky essay on our collective memories.

The Ulysses S. Grant who emerges from Ron Chernow’s new biography, “Grant,” is a man with quite a story to tell. I could easily imagine the pitch for a modern-day memoir: Grant’s struggles with alcoholism, his difficult relationship with his father, his improbable journey to the White House. But Grant left all of that out in the autobiography he did write. When I first flipped through the new, fully annotated edition of “The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant,” edited by John F. Marszalek, with David S. Nolen and Louie P. Gallo, my heart sank. It appeared to be eight hundred pages of troop movements and descriptions of battlefield terrains. Once I started to really read it, however, my impression changed.

Grant’s style is direct and plain, but it has a kind of quiet music to it, the indescribable quality of an authentic voice. There is a level of intimacy that no amount of confessional writing could guarantee. Grant’s assessment of the Civil War and the decisions that went into its waging is mostly brisk and engaging, but what really compelled me through the book were the psychological insights on nearly every page—both of the prominent men whom Grant encountered and of the masses of people whose desires and fears he recognized, sympathized with, and often exploited. Grant’s ability to be empathetic and ruthless in the span of a few sentences—coolly calculating the costs of losing lives against the benefits of pushing on; testing what Southerners could bear and what would make them break—is consistently on display. Whatever Grant hides in his memoir is less than what he reveals. He was a man who could cringe at the cruelty of a bullfight but was willing to send men into certain slaughter to gain a riverbank, a man who understood both dignity and disgrace.—Louisa Thomas

“We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria,” by Wendy Pearlman

I almost didn’t open Wendy Pearlman’s latest book on the Middle East. After spending four decades covering Syria, I couldn’t bear more tales of woe about the millions who have died, fled, been displaced, lost jobs, or are starving from six years of war. But I was quickly hooked by Pearlman’s simple and often captivating human narratives, which chronicle the messy conflict and the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Pearlman, a Northwestern University professor, went to refugee camps and border crossings and tracked down Syrians abroad. All of her book’s characters are now outside Syria. She identifies them only by first name, home town, and profession. There’s no description or context for their situations; they’re faceless. The momentum and unusual impact of this book are built by the wrenching candor of dozens of Syrians from all religions, ethnicities, and major cities. The title comes from Annas, a doctor, who described an early Arab Spring protest, in 2011, when a hundred thousand people turned out: “We crossed a bridge and it trembled underneath our feet because we were so many people.” Shadi, an accountant, described his first demonstration as “better than my wedding day,” after which his wife didn’t speak to him for a month.

The book follows the unravelling of early protests into a full-fledged civil war. Tayseer, a lawyer, describes eight years in prison and the siege of Daraa, the southern town where the uprising began, and the bodies left on the streets. Abu Firas remembers burying his kidnapped brother, whose body was badly disfigured after eighteen days of torture—only to find out three months later that his brother was in prison. The body that he’d buried “was so disfigured that we couldn’t tell he was someone else.” Amin, a physical therapist from Aleppo, explains looking at his cell phone contacts and realizing “only one or two were still alive.” Hakem, a pharmacist, describes helping during surgery—conducted by a veterinarian by the light of a cell phone because the electricity was out—to remove a bullet from a young man’s heart. Abu Tha’ir tells the story of Jaber, who volunteered to find ice for the bodies that could not be buried for hours. “And then Jaber was killed, and we couldn’t find any ice for him.”

There are unsatisfying aspects of Pearlman’s book. The chapters are frustratingly short—two sentences to three pages. It bounces around geographically and sometimes breathlessly. After a chapter outlining Syria’s modern history, it reads like a reporter’s notebook crammed with interviews. It’s all quotes. But the book does well to explain the challenges of the future, not only in ending the war but in healing a traumatized and shell-shocked society.—Robin Wright

“In Praise of Forgetting,” by David Rieff

Lately, I’ve been reading a spiky little book by David Rieff, “In Praise of Forgetting.” It is an argument with the aphorism, from George Santayana, that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. “We never repeat the past, at least not in the way he was suggesting we did,” Rieff writes. “To imagine otherwise is to leach both the past and the present of their specific gravity.” Fully remembering history is impossible, and so what substitutes is a scattershot assembly of heroes and villains, passed down through ritual and recitation, which we receive as cultural memory. Rieff spent much of his career chronicling what he calls “humanitarian emergencies,” in which that memory has been weaponized to deepen grievances and to consolidate a tribe. In the former Yugoslavia, for instance, “it is difficult to imagine how the Serb nationalist obsession with the battle of Kosovo Skopje in 1389 could have been more destructive to everyone affected by it.”

Cultural memory tends to obey the gravity of “shared suffering,” Rieff writes, more than it does common aspirations or universalist principles. His alternative has a therapeutic, New Age tinge: to allow ourselves to forget, to free ourselves from the grievance trap of cultural memory, to bury the past like we bury people, in a box that will be opened again. There is something instrumental, and so distinctly American, about this—it is Jay Gatsby’s kind of philosophy. Though the book was published last year, I sought it out this fall, for help understanding why it was that the disparate elements of Donald Trump’s political coalition, united by race and political preference, seemed so insistent on developing a cultural memory of their own, arranged around Confederate monuments, valorous Second World War movies, and the style in which professional football players used to listen to the national anthem. Was this cultural consolidation, I wondered, a sign of weakness or strength? I took from Rieff a sense of its intractability, of how identity is rigidly formed around selective stories from the past. This should not have surprised me. It is difficult for a nation to shed its history, but, in its own way, it is also much more thrilling.—Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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